Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

Barack Obama will pay a price for Lockerbie bomber's release

It is not just the reputation of Scottish justice that will suffer in America as a consequence of the release "on compassionate grounds" of Abdelbasat Ali Mohmen Al Megrahi. The credibility of Barack Obama's influence on the world is going to take at least as hard a knock. In the end, all the protests and all the diplomatic pressure from the White House counted for nothing. Scotland's determination to return Megrahi to the bosom of his family and his homeland was not going to be blocked.

The rehabilitation of America's standing in the world was going to be one of the great gains, if you remember, of the Obama election victory. No more was the voice of the US to be held in contempt by its old allies. The Obama White House would restore the moral authority of the nation, and thus its influence in the world. So much for that. As the Scottish Justice Secretary intoned his ruling that Megrahi was to be permitted to go free because he was "a dying man", most Americans (even of the liberal Obama persuasion) would be wondering what a life sentence meant if it did not involve dying in prison. But the important political lesson will have gone home. The President and his Secretary of State could do nothing – for all their administration's supposed global prestige – to prevent what they considered to be an outrage. On yet another score, Mr Obama could not deliver the goods.